Some thoughts about Snapchat and news

Snapchat, which launched in 2011 as Picaboo, is generating a lot of buzz lately.

Lots of media orgs have been experimenting with the image/video message app.

But last month Snapchat partnered with a bunch of media orgs (including news.com.au) to launch Snapchat Discover, which puts content one swipe away.

Nieman Lab spoke with five news orgs about how they’re using Snapchat.

Key quotes:

“We’re still very much in the brainstorming phase of how to make it meaningful for us as a news organization.” — Erica Palan, Philly.com
“We’re definitely still in the experimental phase.” — Sam Sheffer, The Verge
“It’s been a secondary effort so far and we’ll have to clearly define our goals before deciding to put more time into it.” — Wright Bryan, NPR
“I might be biased, but I think Fusion is by far the best channel on Snapchat because we are truly offering users news in a way that invites conversation in a genuine way.” — Margarita Noriega, Fusion
“We’re planning on ramping up our Snapchat activity. We’re going to use Snapchat to cover more live events such as award ceremonies, concerts, and popular TV shows.” — Ethan Klapper, Huffington Post
“While it has been a tricky platform to navigate as a brand (lack of analytics, editing tools, etc.), Snapchat continues to provide our audience with unique access to our content and our culture.” — Dasha Battelle, Mashable

Those quotes summarise both the challenges and the potential of the new platform.

Do Snapchat users actually want this content?

Snapchat’s defining feature when it launched was the fact that images/videos self-destruct after a set time. (Did someone say sexting?) It’s now attempting to morph into a content provider, and presumably one motive for this move is if you have content, you can sell ads around it.

It’s interesting that Facebook has actually done the reverse — splitting its chat app away from the content.

This article says some Snapchat stories are being viewed up to 27 million times, and compares that to Sunday’s Oscars, which were watched by an average of 36.6m people in the US.

Pretty impressive, right? Until you compare it to YouTube, where “Gangnam Style” has been watched more than 2.2 billion times although it’s probably not a fair comparison, given that those views accumulated over a longer time period.

(Actually, it’s probably not fair to compare views of short Snap to a two-hour awards ceremony either).

At the moment, Snapchat has an estimated 100m monthly active users. YouTube has 1.35 billion active users each month. Facebook says it’s got 890 million daily active users. Twitter has 284 million monthly active users. Tumblr is coy about it’s active users, presumably because there’s not that many, but there’s a lot of “logged out” activity going on. The figure I could dig up is 225 million unique monthly visitors.

Fusion reckons Snapchat Discover could be “the biggest thing in news since Twitter”.

Kevin Roose writes:

“Unlike Facebook, there’s no algorithmic filter on Snapchat — all the channels are equally visible, whether you’re CNN or Warner Music Group.”

There’s 12 spots available in Snapchat Discover. Is this scalable? If Snapchat decides to roll this out further, either they sacrifice that simple design or they offer users the ability to customise. If it’s the second option, that 100m user base becomes: people who actually want to use the app to consume content that’s not from their BFFs, people who can be bothered customising, people who want your org’s content as opposed to the however many other options they have.

Some other red flags from that same article:

  • “Repackaging stories for Snapchat is harder than repackaging them for Facebook or Twitter, since it often requires custom animation, voice-over, and significant editing of the text itself.”
  • “Love them or hate them, vertical videos are about to make a huge comeback. It’s possible to put horizontally-oriented videos on Snapchat — most channels do, at the moment. But it’s awkward to have to turn your phone sideways each time you want to watch one at full size, and I find myself gravitating toward the videos that are shot vertically in the first place.”
  • “Channels update their stories only once a day, and the effect is that it’s not really a good place to find breaking news.”
  • “There are no links on Discover at all. (Or anything clickable, for that matter.)”

Of course, offsetting all those red flags is Snapchat’s audience, which is much younger than all those other platforms I mentioned earlier.

For me, it’s less about the platform and more about the content. Lots of media organisations are trying to figure out what millennials want. There are a lot of assumptions flying around about what millennials are interested in and how they want to consume news (and if they want to consume news).

I don’t think anyone has nailed it yet. If you have any answers, please email me and we’ll go make a billion dollars together.

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